Weekend Notes

Not a ton to talk about that isn’t basketball related. C came home for her spring break Friday. She took a detour to Cincinnati on the way. Her high school friend who goes to Auburn visited her in Bloomington on Wednesday and they drove over to visit friends at UC Thursday before finally looping back to Indy.

L had another long weekend, as the Indy St. Patrick’s Day parade was Friday and Cathedral always takes the day off for that.[1] She celebrated by filling an online application for a job. She got a response that night, with an interview scheduled for Sunday, at which she got the job! She begins training later today on how to properly scoop ice cream.

We took the girls out for dinner on Saturday evening. S and I watched a movie together. The girls had no interest in joining us for that part of the evening.

Sunday was crazy warm and crazy windy, into the low 70s with winds well above 50 MPH. Followed by storms later in the evening, fortunately just heavy rain and not severe as they had been when they rolled through the St. Louis area. This morning the wind chill is in the teens and we are expecting flurries in the next hour or so.

Big 12 Tournament

Before we get to KU, the Iowa State – Arizona game Friday was one of the great games in recent memory. There was a little lull between about the 10:00 and 5:00 marks of the second half where neither team could hit a shot, there were lots of bad turnovers, and what had been a pretty solid game seemed to go off the rails.

I think both teams were just taking a pause to prepare for the last five minutes. Those were pure excellence. I yelled out loud on multiple shots, in a game I had no rooting interest in. So fun to watch two teams who can trade big bucket after big bucket and never get rattled. Arizona won at the buzzer, but had there been 5–10 seconds left on the clock, I’m pretty sure Iowa State would have hit their own game winner. This game deserved overtime.

Apparently they sucked all the good ball out of the building, because the nightcap stunk. Well, it stunk for KU, who started in a big hole, made one run, then completely fell apart. Houston hit four straight 3s to open the game but, honestly, I don’t think they played lights out. Their defense sure as hell shut KU down, but KU’s offense was so bad that Houston barely needed to do anything to advance. Missing 17 straight shots is hard to do, even against a really good team like Houston. KU managed to do it. Hard to believe KU basically controlled the last 23 minutes of the game when these teams played just three weeks ago.

The last 6–8 games have not inspired much confidence for KU doing anything the next one-to-three weeks. They still seem disjointed on offense. Darryn Peterson definitely has his burst back, but seems like he’s playing more to prove something than with the smoothness and control he’s known for. I swear he was better when he was playing at like 80% and couldn’t make it through the entire game. Bryson Tiller has completely disappeared, and got benched for the second half Friday. Melvin Council Jr. hit a wall last week and admitted he isn’t bringing the energy he brought earlier in the year.

Zero good vibes.

In summary: looks like another short stay in the NCAA tournament for the Jayhawks. Thank the Hoops Gods we won a title just four years ago, although that seems a lot longer ago than that.

NCAA Tournament

I figured KU was a 4/5, and the difference doesn’t mean a whole lot. Folks were clinching up about a possible date with Northern Iowa, as if the 2010 game would have anything to do with a rematch in 2026. If KU slipped to 5 and the brackets were otherwise the same, that would indeed be Friday’s game. Hell, UNI might beat St. John’s and we could get that in the second round. Just like in 2010…

Regardless of opponent, if KU gets through Cal Baptist Friday the second round will be a compelling match up. If it is St. John’s that means KU will face Zuby Ejiofor, who began his career in Lawrence and transferred away when the Jayhawks signed Hunter Dickinson. Ejiofor has become a force in New York and a lot of KU fans wish Bill Self had kept and developed him and Ernest Udeh instead of taking Dickinson. The Ejiofor – Flory Bidunga matchup will be a fascinating battle of strength vs strength. Hell, maybe we need to play Zuby to symbolically close this mini-era of KU hoops.

Going to San Diego is weird when KU is in the East, but that’s par for the course in the modern tournament. Mega conferences ruin so much that is good about sports.

There was a new metric that may have been around a while but I just heard about this year: Wins Above Bubble. It takes the baseball concept of Wins About Replacement and brings it to college hoops, applying it to teams rather than players. It takes each team’s resume and doesn’t compare it to other, similar teams, but rather to a theoretical bubble team. How much better are you than the threshold for getting into the tournament?

I like this. Not because it’s a perfect measure, none of the March metrics are. Rather because it is completely based on results. The NET, which the NCAA uses to build their bracket, specifically has a predictive component in it. This is dumb. They are not predicting a winner, like the people who sit down this week and make their bracket picks. Their task is to select the teams most deserving of inclusion in the tourney, based on their body of work. WAB does that better than NET. So of course the NCAA will stick with NET and pretend WAB does not exist.

Most of all, I like Wins Above Bubble because it shows that Miami (OH) is clearly more deserving of a tournament bid than Auburn. Which the committee got right! Barely.

Fuck the Pearls, by the way.[2]

As I casually watched ball this weekend I was reminded that maybe it is best NOT to watch conference tournaments, at least if you want to pick a good NCAA bracket. How many times have we all fallen in love with some team that got hot for one weekend, only to see them go splat a week later? Or overreact to a team that rolled through the regular season, then stubbed their toe when playing a team for the third time, and we jumped off the bandwagon only to see them make a deep run?

I took a lot of grief last year for picking all four #1 seeds to get to the Final Four. I also won one pool and finished in the money in the other. So screw all of you who talked shit.

I’m actually, at least on my first run, not going chalk this year. My Sunday night, first glance, Final Four is: UConn, Illinois, Arizona, and Michigan. I really want to pick Iowa State, and I think they’ll get to the Elite 8. But Michigan is just so big I think they’ll give the Clones fits. My only other hedge is in the East, where I expect the winner of the UConn-Michigan State Sweet 16 game to reach the Final Four. Arizona wins it all. These could change before games tip Thursday. Illinois and M’s high school classmate Jake Davis better not get too comfortable.[3]

Also worth noting, I will likely not see KU play live again this year. They got the dreaded last game of the night Friday, a spot they’ve famously lost in twice.[4] We have a very early flight to Cancun Saturday morning. So I’ll be in bed before the game tips. If KU wins that, I’ll likely be at the pool or on the beach when they play again Sunday. Get to the Sweet 16? We’ll still be in Mexico. So they really need to win three games for me to see them again, and even then we return that Saturday so there’s a chance I could miss an Elite 8 game. I’m not super confident they can win two games, let alone three.

Yes, they have TVs in Mexico. However, when we were last there over spring break our hotel room TVs did not carry the networks showing the games. I had to follow that epic Purdue-Virginia Elite 8 game via updates on ESPN. If it works out I can watch the games, great. But I’m not abandoning the sun to watch a second round game, nor hanging out in a bar to watch the Sweet 16.

If you put twenty, or even ten years ago me in a time machine and let him know this was how I was spending the tournament, he would have no idea what I had turned into. Shame I still can’t sleep after late games, win or lose.

Zen

I fell into an odd YouTube rabbit hole last night. I needed to tie a knot for something over the weekend and did the standard, clueless guy overhand knot repeated multiple times until the cord was a jumbled mess. Afterward I decided I should learn how to tie a proper knot before I next needed one. Who knew there were so many knots, or that there were so many aesthetically pleasing YouTube channels devoted to them?[5] There’s everything from basic examples that are just stacked time lapsed photos, to ones with high production values and deep explanations. My favorite, though, was KNOTMASTR’s, which are very ASMR-y thanks to their low key vibe and gentle Mediterranean music in the background. I may start using these to reset my brain on the nights I can’t sleep!